Unpopular opinions

[CynicalGiant]

I think these two opinions (more so habits of mine) are fairly unpopular but unsure of just how unpopular or unusual they are

1) whenever I'm playing a particular gen I have only ever used pokemon of that gen. even if an old favorite appears and is available I have never used it unless it got a specifically new evolution or form in that gen. I used Alolan Sandslash and Alolan Golem in gen 7 but I wouldn't have if they were just regular Golem or Sandslash (even tho I like both)

If I'm playing a particular gen I'm playing it to play that gen, I don't care about the old pokemon in that instance. Gen 5's no old pokemon gimmick was cool, felt like they were catering to me specifically lmao.

2) I don't think I've ever caught a pokemon without the intention of using it. There's an entire gameplay loop I've never interacted with that I presume is the intended way of playing, of constantly catching new pokemon and swapping them in and out as they get weaker or less useful. I almost didn't get thru Legends Arceus originally because of how much I don't like actually catching pokemon I'm not going to battle with, as strange as that is to say.

Obviously the level curves in a lot of games get very strange if your team size is essentially on par with the rivals, like one new pokemon per gym until 6, sometimes like 3+ gyms without a single new member depending on the game or what specific team member I wanted.

_____

I agree with the HM opinions that it was interesting and compelling game design in Gen 1 but it was getting rather tedious. I also honestly had more fun with the bizarre roadblocks they introduced thruout the gens that effectively functioned as an HM block without being one. The one that comes to mind is the "We're standing here for no reason, and one day we'll be gone for no reason" gag from Unova.

 

[Sonikku A]

the graphics themselves are fine, i think the game looks ugly because its washed out and grey with a pretty meh pallete. theres no graphic quality improvement that can save bad coloring

SV's terrain textures were disgustingly saturated, yet object lighting was horrendously dim with overly blue ambient lighting not impacted by area. Texture filtering and vertex paint methods were also disgustingly outdated. The mon models despite attempts of trying to not be flat for textures were hit miss. Fur textures still feel like painted on plastic figures for the most part, though I like Magnemite being metallic for the first time since Stadium-PBR

Meanwhile, SZA pros;
-Mon/object colors aren't dim
-Building designs are generally better
-Char design for player is better, and I like the inverse for rival
-Per eye tracking. The "Gyarados ️‍?" meme is funny

However

-The lack of normal maps for terrain is extremely noticeable. A lot of buildings look cheaply painted on
-Texture res for terrain is still bad, and suffers similar outdated vertex paint issues
-Chars have gross rimlighting applied, reminds me of Shadow x Gens. Actually this is an issue I notice in """cartoony""" games after the 2010s, like why do it!? It makes the char stand out artificially in dark areas, and look overexposed when seen close up in bright areas. Smash ult has the same issue, but it makes everyone look greyer, I can't-
-The hat is shit for players. Also feel the shoes for the girl player could be swapped for something better, though I'm nitpicking at this point

I do agree this graphically looks like a *Wii U game* overall. It's incredibly budget upon further inspection. Artstyle is still better than SV, but eh

Actually something that's been bugging me in the past few years, why are "stylistic" games getting worse with lighting? Or just awkwardly be rigidly stock for lighting like...

I already complained about SwSh/SV tweaking face normals to *look* flat, but all it does is make it look inconsistent with other parts of the body, and be too harsh outside front -> 3/4 angles. Like embrace light contrast, c'mon. It seems like devs are replicating post 2010 anime industry shading optimizations just for ease without prior awareness of this. For 3D this ironically ends up being harder to do (well it's 1 extra step in model making, but still)

I have a lotta nitpicks, but SZA is still better than SV visually

 

[Lontra Assassina]

-Chars have gross rimlighting applied, reminds me of Shadow x Gens. Actually this is an issue I notice in """cartoony""" games after the 2010s, like why do it!? It makes the char stand out artificially in dark areas, and look overexposed when seen close up in bright areas. Smash ult has the same issue, but it makes everyone look greyer, I can't-

Speaking from the perspective of a visual artist, rim lighting is a handy way to stylized directional lighting without worrying too much about the different planes of the object. You see it a lot with anime-style characters, as they tend to use one or two tone shading at most.

One thing I miss from PLA having mostly flat-colored models is that it allowed for very dramactic lighting, as the colors and shadows shifted entirely depending on the time of day. in PLZA, the difference is much more subtle.

 

[CynicalGiant]

I think it would be nice if the Pokemon games looked better graphically but it isn't something I require to enjoy an RPG. I really liked Metaphor: Refantazio and that game had several hideous textures and environments.


Granted, not an artist, but I think they should lean more into a particular aesthetic art style to hide a lot of the graphical problems. I think Legend of Zelda: Windwaker is the example I always think of most from Non-pokemon, and the pokemon example I think of a lot is Let's Go. (I don't like the chibi people but the environments and pokemon look pretty nice)

 

[Sonikku A]

Speaking from the perspective of a visual artist, rim lighting is a handy way to stylized directional lighting without worrying too much about the different planes of the object. You see it a lot with anime-style characters, as they tend to use one or two tone shading at most.

I'm aware, but it's extremely overdone, and exacerbates how mediocre the actual lighting is for darker areas, same for lack of dynamic point lights the rest. LZA already isn't a cel shaded game, the actual base lighting isn't stylized for the most part. It reminds me how badly the industry did bloomy brown/green contrast the 360 Gen just cuz "it was the norm"

Back to that PLA example, it's true it has better contrast for shading, but I find the shader kinda piss. It's just grey there for shaded areas with no ambient color applied, and is harshly 2 tones when a more detailed mon like Tangrowth should probably be 3. This ignores how ugly and sparse the rest of the terrain is

Like lemme tweak...

Made it more orange for base tone, with a hacky draw over of a mid tone, and bluer ambient shading. Even tweaked grass to be more orange to reflect the skybox

Also I'll ignore the trees having really bad normals

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

Regional Forms and Convergent Species (Regional Fakes) should be treated like Wiglett/Diglett in SV.

Both are available in the same game, but in different biomes.

I could make a case for it being more plausible for a bunch of Vulpix to move within the same region and eventually become Alolan Vulpix, and how the Hisuian starters technically evolve and adapt during the events of PLA, but I have a much simpler reason.

It'd be neat.

 

[LPBvgc]

The 3DS Era (more specifically 2015-2018) was peak Pokémon.

Spoiler

The 3DS Era introduced fun battle gimmicks such as Mega Evolution and Z-Moves, and these were adapted beautifully in the TCG as Mega EXes (your turn ends when you Mega Evolve an EX) and GXes (once per game GX attack).

Speaking of the TCG, the BREAK Era is one of my favorite Eras of all time. They were able to make a full blown story arc using Pokémon Cards! While the Sun and Moon Era tried this using Ultra Necrozma GX and Ultra Beasts invading Alola, it didn't feel the same as the BREAK Era. Still, the SM Era up to Forbidden Light played a big part of my childhood.

Another thing was that many popular (and a certain controversial) Pokétubers blew up during this Era. Truegreen7, MandJTV, AuraGuardian... Hell, does anyone remember watching a certain BroGamerChannel or PokémonRangerboy12? Their content were a part of my childhood, along with those MMD vine videos and shaped my humor at the time. Although looking back at BroGamer's content, it doesn't seem as epic as it used to as a kid.

The anime was amazing during this time. Although I did have a negative experience with Amourshipping when I was 9 (I wanted Serena for myself at the time). I was in DENIAL when I saw THAT escalator scene. Hell, I am still pissed at Ash over it to this day, not because of dry docking, but because of how a 10 YEAR OLD got his first kiss yet I am turning 18 this year and am kissless and single.

Also Pokémon GO made Pokémania 2.0, and it's turning 9 this year. Feel old yet?

I feel like the 3DS Era will be seen at the best Era in the coming years, as the community (especially those who grew up during this Era) grow up and look back at it fondly, and see this Era in the same light as people do with the DS Era now.

 

[ant4456]

Gaming journalism is somehow even worse than sports journalism and has been for a long time. The saying that "You can't spell ignorance without IGN" has been around for at least 15 years now, maybe even two decades. And we all know there are many reasons for that.

It's also nigh-impossible to be taken seriously, as most of it is seen as bought-out and extremely shallow.

Same deal as reviews while I'm at it.

This is a terrible take tbh but it's a very common one because few in the gaming space actually seem to understand the role of game journalism and have any media literacy when it comes to things like reviews.

I remember when Xenoblade fans were shitting on IGN because their Xenoblade DE review had a slightly lower score than the original, and the video for the review had someone mispronouncing the names.

So they said the reviewer clearly didn't even play it, or even any game in the series. This is despite the guy who wrote it (named Travis) constantly referred to the original title throughout practically the entire review. And it's pretty known if you look through that he is a big fan of Xenoblade, his specialty is RPGs in the first place.

Then people shit on a discrepancy which is that despite Travis the Xenoblade DE reviewer saying it's the best version of the game, the 3DS version had a better score (8.7) and the original had the best (9/10). This is easily explained by the fact that all of these were written by different people over the course of a decade and with different expectations in mind:

Now let's do something that nobody in any game review discourse ever does: read the fucking reviews.

Let's evaluates some context for the reviews. The first one is inherently going to have the most gravitas going towards it; Xenoblade Chronicles is a massive, singleplayer MMORPG odyssey essentially, and they somehow fit it onto the Wii. Not only that, but this game actually had other reasons for hype at the time: Xenoblade Chronicles almost never came to America, and its releasing here took a fan effort (

At the time, Reggie and Nintendo of America was infamous for not believing in their market's ability to accept these types of titles, and skipped out on many titles. Some still didn't make it. This is in spite of these all having English localizations already, having come to English-speaking European countries.

Next up, when we read the blurb under the Review title, we get another tidbit into the minds of the reviewers:

One of the Wii's first and last epic JRPGs is the best thing to emerge from this troubled genre in the past five years.​

This is because, at the time, JRPGs were in a bit of a slump. Final Fantasy was in a dark place, Dragon Quest entered the era where it took a while to get new entries, Monster Hunter wasn't nearly as big outside of Japan. Pokemon wasn't largely seen as a "JRPG" to a lot of people, Persona hadn't popped off with Persona 5 yet (though it was definitely a known quantity, and this was the year of Persona 4: Golden.)

All that to say, JRPGs had, in fact, been in a it of a slump, and the reviewer clearly is going into it with it being an exception to a general rule. This will, of course, naturally impact their perception of the title's quality. So we're essentially combining several Wow-Factors on top here, just from a bit of videogame history knowledge and reading three lines of the article.
-Getting a game like this on the Wii was insane.
-JRPGs were in a bit of a slump.

Now, let's continue onto the "thesis" of this review.

The writer is establishing the tone here quite clearly, Xenoblade Chronicles is, to their view, a special game within the genre. What I care more about, however, is the retrospective perspective- some of the things written here as points in Xenoblade's uniqueness is actually really common now, and if anything that's already becoming "counter-cultured" within the genre.

Xenoblade Chronicles is, again, kind of a singleplayer MMO RPG, and that is mentioned here with the side quests. You can go around the world and grab quests from NPCs, go and fight monsters off the beaten path and find goodies, and increase reputation, get new armor, etc. MMO shit. This was not as common back then, and it's also something that many modern RPGs are back-lashing towards, and a few years ago people kind of started getting sick of.

Nowadays most things like this would be considered "padding", and in my opinion, for good reason. An excuse to force you to do a lot more shit to get little, all for that 100%. In fact, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, two years after DE, changed the systems a lot. These sort of fetch quests and reputation with settlements still exists, but it's all passive and you can do it by just going to a menu from anywhere in the world and clicking A like three times to finish the quest.

Most of the other quests are instead mini-questlines with optional characters that add depth to the world, and are often (almost) main quest level events. So they've eased back on this sort of thing over time, and for good reason, this kind of thing blows. Persona 5 blowing up was a big push for RPGs to, rather than throw in this kind of padding, try to use side characters as a way to associate side content that fleshes out the world positively. Every Xenoblade game had Heart-to-Hearts where characters in the party talk to each other optionally, usually without a quest, and Xenoblade 3 got rid of it for that kind of approach.

Moving on,

Also worth noting that the culture around this type of game element, random shit all over the world, is kind of hitting its own counter-culture. You don't have to go far to hear "I'm sick of exploring an empty plane to pick up fifteen Scrimblos so I can make one thing I care about." In the years between the original and the remake, sprawling worlds full of materials are everywhere, and people are kind of sick of it. This is the kind of thing that makes games age no matter how new they are, or even irrespective of the graphics. Evolution of game design.

Skipping ahead some irrelevant stuff for this essay,

For anyone who hasn't seen it, it really isn't that stylish compared to most things today. And if I were to review Xenoblade DE, something like how that barely looks better in the newer version is in fact something that'd stick in my mind for a $60 Remake.

More mention of disappointment with RPGs before this game in the last 5 years.

And active disappointment with RPGs of the time, and how Xenoblade isn't like that. Even going as far as to say "this struggling genre". The linearity of Final Fantasy XIII made it a clear punching bag for a lot of the industry (and a lot of the players) back then, so it's not too surprising to see it mentioned negatively. There is however a growing number of people who like the game.

And that ends this -'ridin sesh from this author. Now let's talk about the 3-ish years between this game and the 3DS port. So far, we had zero real sequels between Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 3D as Xenoblade Chronicles X, the only pre-Switch one, was still not out yet. Notably, the 3DS game had its own wow-factor, being that now it's running on a fucking 3DS.

Notably, Monolith Soft actually weren't the main developers on this port, and that port team is Monster Games. Anywho, Xenoblade 3D was a very low-scale project that really was just porting it to the New 3DS, with few extras, mainly a way to listen to the music any time you'd like.

This is a very short review, but the reviewer (Jose, different person) gives it a lower score than the original for a very clear reason.

The port is still given its flowers for still basically being the full package,

but this is a port of a 3 year old game for full-price on a system that, to be clear, you had to buy the New version to even play it. 8.7/10 seems fine to me, a lower score for a good port that could've been polished more, but overall about the same thing.

Then we get to the review that really, truly grinded people's gears:

By Travis, the review starts with a recap on how the game has never truly had a good shot with its ports before, coming on low-spec consoles. After that, we get a paragraph about actually one of the more hit/miss changes with the remake, and one that the reviewer is mostly positive on.

Now I want to give a little spiel about this, I don't agree with this reviewer, I am one of the people where the game's new artstyle is absolutely a "miss". Now, to be clear, Xenoblade Chronicles DE absolutely is better on a technical level in every way, and many blurry points before now look perfectly fine. But what I actually prefer in the original is the less generically "anime" artstyle:

It's best shown with these portraits which are used in the battle UI in my opinion, because here we can remove the "bias" I guess you could say with low-poly Shulk versus high-poly Shulk. In my opinion, this loses a lot of the charm especially for a war-torn world that wasn't really built from the ground-up for this artstyle.

Next I want to point out that the beginning of the third fucking paragraph instantly mentions that the reviewer played the game around a decade ago.

You could maybe argue this is ambiguous, but "right back" to me is pretty clear, and we get like fifteen statements like this. Anywho, in the next paragraph we instantly find one of those clashes from eight years apart + different reviewers!

While both this and the original review are positive on the story, they have completely different takes on what the story actually is. The original review praised Xenoblade for having "none of the pompousness and melodrama of less accomplished Japanese epics," and some other comments on the writing that I didn't nitpick earlier.

I'd say that this and "dialogue laughably over-written" are, while not complete contradictions, different views on something over many years. And within the Xenoblade community to begin with, lots of dialogue from the games is entirely memed for its self-seriousness, lines being repeated, etc.

The DE remake reviewer does praise the character writing, and that's not a contradiction. The characters don't need to be believable to be fun to read, but I'd kind of agree with Travis who makes consistent mention that the game's writing gets wonky, it does take itself too seriously (and that's charming), it is melodramatic and more.

The DE reviewer finds great annoyance with the constant talking though, while the original reviewer

sees it as defying their expectations of what they view RPG characters as being like at the time. The DE reviewer goes on to talk about gameplay improvements, and lack of improvements, mentioning a few QoL bits for the UI such as actual health bars and indicators for the player to know their positioning will get them bonuses. But then they go onto say that there isn't much changed:

This is really getting at the meat-and-potatoes on how a game that the reviewer says is "the best version" could get a lower review than the previous two- "Wii-era RPG design". Game reviewers tend to have different opinions on this kind of thing. Should remasters be judged as if they came out today, should it be about improvements to the original, or some other nebulous things?

Personally, I am of the opinion that if a remaster costs $60 it should come at the quality of a $60 game, and I get the vibe that's how this reviewer kind of feels as well. Beyond that, we see that in the last eight years of design change, fucking around in the kinda-boring-overworld and fighting/collecting things over and over has become a tedious negative.

The reviewer does praise the change to menuing, which is good, but this is still a compliment sandwich where clearly the fillings grinded the writer's gears the most. They do this again, writing a paragraph about how combat is still great with switching between characters,

we get this. Then we get a full paragraph about how the OST is incredible, of course.

So the reviewer gives it an 8/10, and its verdict makes it pretty clear. Despite how the game is finally on hardware where the game can truly be free, it's been eight years and shit has changed. Now, where does this all lead? Should be clear that the controversy over this review is pretty silly and that if you think about the reviews all of it makes sense.

They reviewed it as a $60 product in 2020 rather than an incremental rerelease from 2012 that just needed to be it again. And I think that's fine if not good. But you wanna know why I spend all this time defending reviews? Because this is the type of review that is actually good. The perspective of a critical veteran to the series is something that is highly vital to a review in my opinion, and this kind of thing really is a time capsule into both worlds of what happened between releases.

This is a good review that was recorded into a video by someone who hadn't played it. Who cares. Well, people don't think about it this way because we are so used to Youtube Essayist shitters who do everything and have a "persona". People see journalist organizations as just an organization rather than a group of people, which is part of the problem with media literacy on these topics in general.

People have also become used to fishing for "hypocrisy" which you can use to make any review from a company that has existed as long as IGN look silly. This company has had hundreds of people make reviews for them in the past with the control to write review scores, and people act like it should still be a leaderboard or some shit. "If a 7.5/10 today is a game better than a 8/10 from some random writer making a review for a game in 2014 with different expectations, IGN is entirely ridiculous".

I mean, almost every example of IGN reviews being dumb are just not accepting opinions, expecting complete "consistency" (whatever that's supposed to be, reviews should be personal as they are), or just making up a narrative. I mean I get it too, being a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fan. Look at this:

From paragraph one we already can tell this reviewer really doesn't give a shit about the game.

Like, this guy really hates this game series and thinks it's really not fun, it's pointless, hates the plot (which most people like), etc.

And like, alright. This review kinda sucks, right? Like, it's so dripping with bias that it's hard to take everything at face value. Which is a fucking good thing. A review is a personal account, not a fucking Wikipedia page.

If I wanted a neutral, dryly-written tale on each element of the game I'd have so many fucking ways outside of a review. This is what reviews are for, bluntly, in the most crude way! I absolutely detest this reviewer's opinion, and don't even think this is a "good review", but it's not a bad one. It's an honest one.

If you care about graphics like it not looking like a GBA game? He's got you covered, telling you it looks like that and he dislikes it. Bought the last game and was hoping for massive improvements? He doesn't see many, and he covers that. And frankly, you can make a good argument that the gameplay is "dated". Go to any r/mysterydungeon random user and you'll find that like 50% of PMD fans think the gameplay is fucking mid anyways. The only thing I'll say is there is one bit of actual misinformation which is that Vulpix is also a playable character now, but also whatever sure. The tone this guy has would piss me off I was like 14, but I understand that if you are like 30 and your company tells you to go from probably playing some AAA titles to this you'd probably also be like this:

Which is also, unironically, laughably really fucking funny and so true. I mean people talk up the "difficulty" of these games, but I ran this game with partner Eevee (shocking??!?!?!) and a mid ass starter several times and yeah this game definitely plays the same. And a critique on needing to read a FAQ to get your starter is really fucking funny to me right now, and has always been true - and later games changed this for good reason. Bro also knows about the fury culture with the Phanpy line too LOL.

He also gives some credit which I think is fair:

Yeah I agree that Special Episodes feel a bit weird, some of the early ones kinda suck, and that the later ones are better. I also agree that frankly the better ones would be better tied into the main story more. This is real critique that I actually rarely see from PMD fans despite this being part of why I rarely touch the Special Episodes myself.

So, Mr. Jack from IGN in 2008, fuck you. But also like, the review isn't bad. It's just not something I agree with. And that's the mindset I think people should have more with reviews.

People shit on IGN if they step out of line, or if they keep in line, it honestly doesn't matter. Give every AAA game an 8/10 because they're genuinely mostly fine? IGN sucks. Give Pokemon a 7.8/10 and mention a genuine flaw with the region for a full-price title? Also fuck you, get memed for a decade.

It's not just IGN, of course. I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 was dropping and GameSpot reviewer got the PS4 copy, and gave a pretty negative review.

So here we have a 7/10 given to Cyberpunk 2077, a game that these people hadn't played yet because it wasn't out, and all the replies are fucking wilding out about how this is hypocritical for Skyrim, this reviewer is clearly just woke, "That's the person who did the 7.8/10!", "She's just an offended woman!", etc.

And of course, we all know how this turned out. Someone tried to tread the middleground of not being completely harsh without a day one patch and also reviewing what they were given, and they got harassed to no end by people who hadn't played the game yet.

This is gaming journalism almost working but the people lash out so hard that it fails. Game journalism is important but chuds and frankly just gamers in general actually hate journalism. It tells them games they haven't played aren't as good as they like, or games they don't like are better than they thought, and it's people rather than an AI generated review score on a mental leaderboard of titles.

I don't think I know a single person who hates gaming journalism who actually lacks brainrot about it because there isn't really a reason to hate it as a whole. This whole post has been mainly focused on reviews, since that gets the most talked about, but then you have people like Jason Schreier who is publishing books on Blizzard projects that we will never see the day of, how gaming journalists talk to whistleblowers on crunch, layoffs, and more.

Rock Paper Shotgun, for instance, is an outlet mainly focused on the industry at large and has an entire page dedicated to all the stories of layoffs, which is really important and a way we get people like Geoff Keighley to finally acknowledge the situation. But notably, this also means that people had to write all of these, too.

Gaming journalism is important because the industry is important and having a variety of opinions is important, especially from people who are actually going to play thousands of games. A lot of reviews I see that fans of one series dislike will read like "This game is fine but it's not too special" because they've played many games like it at the same or greater scale, and that's why when games like Astro Bot, Balatro, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 sweep awards and get mass critical acclaim it's very clear from the get-go. When even the people who've played the biggest games back-to-back-to-back are able to articulate how a game like Breath of the Wild is truly different, that's how we get games like Ocarina of Time standing the test of time on Metacritic.

 

[Bakugames]

its always funny that gamers, the base that is most known for not reading and being generally stupid as fuck and barely being able to interact with games as they are, let alone as art pieces, love to shit on reviews. anyway the 7.8 review is completely correct hoenn has too much fucking water. all these routes are the same shit of the same 3 encounters, the same trainers having the same teams, while dragging your poor water type around because you already wasted 3 slots of hms on your hm mule and you need 3 more water hms to progress through the water section

 

[ant4456]

its always funny that gamers, the base that is most known for not reading and being generally stupid as fuck and barely being able to interact with games as they are, let alone as art pieces, love to shit on reviews. anyway the 7.8 review is completely correct hoenn has too much fucking water. all these routes are the same shit of the same 3 encounters, the same trainers having the same teams, while dragging your poor water type around because you already wasted 3 slots of hms on your hm mule and you need 3 more water hms to progress through the water section

i'm too tired to write out a super long thing (i hope that is understandable) so simply put Yea, I Agree lol

 

[Mad Ram]

Eh, there are legitimate issues with game reviews, especially score inflation, but again, people really aren't good at pointing out those issues or even their own role at perpetrating those issues, and by and large influencer reviewers tend to be even worse.

 

[ant4456]

Eh, there are legitimate issues with game reviews, especially score inflation, but again, people really aren't good at pointing out those issues or even their own role at perpetrating those issues, and by and large influencer reviewers tend to be even worse.

i mention it in the half-a-forum-page-long post that tbh imo score inflation or w/e doesn't matter, let people give scores from their heart, trying to think of scores on a leaderboard scale of media is silly, dumb, would never work

if guy from 2025 thinks a game you think is slop is an 8 and guy from 2007 thinks a game you like is a 7.2, who cares, let bygones be bygones it's different times and people in the first place

i do agree that people make it worse tho with their criticism bc people get death threats when they give a game people are excited for anything under a 7, but IGN ironically has been one of the few outlets consistently going for the jugular as of late and people have been shitting on them for it

like when this happened people got really mad

even tho people have been bitching for years that IGN always gives COD a 7+

i think scores should not really be a big part of the whole ordeal anyways, i think scores should be seen less as a "Report Card" and more as the reviewer's Vibe

 

[Bakugames]

there will always be game review issuses based on the reviewer and just how number scores in general can just muddle things up: everyone has their own personal view of a number score, where the baseline is etc etc etc. but i think no one who complained about game reviews have engaged with them other than the tweet announcing a new review was posted. and ultimately i find that even game reviews i completely disagree with are pretty useful. if i love idk unga babunga difficulty and the reviewer is like this game only does unga babunga difficulty and refuses to be anything else, i'll be like holy shitttt im playing that

 

[Celever]

99% of the discourse around game reviewers is rooted in the fact that they're completely irrelevant now. Which is fine because so are... pretty much all reviewers. The only reviewers that still hold a semblance of relevancy are music publications and that's because there's so much music that what music a publication chooses to review and therefore platform is significant in itself, and assists those who interact with it in their music discovery journeys. Even with music, no one really cares what they have to say about e.g. the new Lady Gaga album because we all know who Lady Gaga is and if we have any interest in the album in the first place we'll just stream it for free on Spotify / Apple Music.

This is why video game reviews are constantly memed on, because no one is actually treating them as reviews. ant touched on this with the fact that no one really reads them. They just want the score to reflect how they feel and then the entire body of text is treated with a "sir, this is a Wendy's" lens because what they actually have to say about the game doesn't really matter to the reader. That means the only meaningful interaction people can derive from game reviews anymore is come level of comedy.

And that's just due to obsoletion. If you're in 2 minds over whether you want to try out a game or not, you watch someone play it on YouTube or Twitch for an hour and then decide whether it seems like your vibe. That's why, for a while and still to an extent currently, games often prioritised graphics, presentation, and gimmicks over core gameplay. You can't get a good feel for how the gameplay works from watching a video of someone playing the game, usually whoever's playing only has fleeting moments of talking about the gameplay itself and most of it is focussed on being entertaining. Reviews talk about gameplay but no one reads them anymore, and gamers only experience the gameplay after they've already made the purchasing decision anyway, so it got deprioritised.

It's got nothing to do with the quality of the game reviews themself which yeah I'm sure are still of good quality. I agree with ant's post, I mean for me Xenoblade Chronicles should be considered and is a 10/10 game because of the context in which the game happened, it's one of the most revolutionary and downright impressive games of all time in every respect, so things like the scoring discrepancy where it originally gets a 9/10 while XCDE gets a lower score, all that makes total sense. But I also get why reviews are memed on, because it makes sense why people don't care about them any more.

(Not just from a technological PoV btw, even though that's extremely impressive. I also find XC1's combat and gameplay to be excellent and novel, RTS with a focus on positioning, chain attacks, the way it controls and its UI in-combat, do you understand how much it blew my mind when I first played it as a teenager. Impressive character variety too where each of them have genuine identities of their own and you're interested in using each of them and rotating them around based on mood, even more so than the Tales series which is also strong in this regard. 10/10 game I stand by it).

 

[Sonikku A]

Now I want to give a little spiel about this, I don't agree with this reviewer, I am one of the people where the game's new artstyle is absolutely a "miss". Now, to be clear, Xenoblade Chronicles DE absolutely is better on a technical level in every way, and many blurry points before now look perfectly fine. But what I actually prefer in the original is the less generically "anime" artstyle:

View attachment 721166

It's best shown with these portraits which are used in the battle UI in my opinion, because here we can remove the "bias" I guess you could say with low-poly Shulk versus high-poly Shulk. In my opinion, this loses a lot of the charm especially for a war-torn world that wasn't really built from the ground-up for this artstyle.

Love this post, though some things

I actually disagree that the latter is more anime. It's just more modern
The left is very much based on late 80-90s anime, as well as shoujo manga influence for how mouths are drawn/shaded. I DO prefer it though, especially for models cuz modern anime styles severely flatten the face, even for models. As such we can get more dynamic shading with the older style, but I digress

The other thing, while you are right that IGN interviews are not a monolith, it's the fact that games only have 1 reviewer doing them each a genuine issue, especially if it's someone biased against it. You mentioned how attrocious the MD review was, and it's unfortunately common for how diversified reviewers faded over time. The Sonic Unleashed interview with gameplay is infamous: they go out of their way of following the path to straight up jumping into bottomless pits for Daytime, while Night time despite saying combat is sluggish they ironically play way better for it fluidly

But more importantly, reviewers like him were first off, starting with preestablished bias from common gamer opinion at the time. This also includes genuine xenophobia (see the IGN backed show), which contributed to the JRPG slump in the west, as well as severe insecurity for liking cuter games, as gamers were still running on 90s western marketing for vibes. This unfortunately has an effect for long time franchises, where deviating from the norm heavily will be seen as bad. Sonic is infamous for appeal suddenly growing harsh after he stopped being 1st party, Pokemon similarly suffered a lesser extent of spinoffs doing poorly in relation to mainline after Pokemania died. A lot of old NeoGaf or other gaming site opinions still dictate these fandoms heavily, and I noticed devs trying desperately not to invoke the wrath of those opinions, even though the people that spouted them mostly moved on

Personally, I find game journalism severely mixed cuz of this: on one hand, we have someone actually competent to give fair and detailed analysis. On the other, we have a gamer that refuses to engage with the material cuz of preestablished bias, or just not even liking the genre of gameplay. And unfortunately, the reviews regardless can shape opinion for a game for some

It's no surprise gaming companies seriously took less risks after the 2008 crash, relying way more on nostalgia for older franchises, or in Sony's case, straight abandoning them

 

[Karxrida]

I remember when Xenoblade fans were shitting on IGN because their Xenoblade DE review had a slightly lower score than the original, and the video for the review had someone mispronouncing the names.

I agree with the rest of your post, but I do want to say that them being shat on for mispronouncing names in the video review is super valid. The game has voice acting so it's not like there's ambiguity there.

let people give scores from their heart

Me giving Dark Souls III a 7/10 because the PVP and several bosses are ass and the DLC a -10/Never because fuck that shit lmao.

 

[ant4456]

I agree with the rest of your post, but I do want to say that them being shat on for mispronouncing names in the video review is super valid. The game has voice acting so it's not like there's ambiguity there.

Me giving Dark Souls III a 7/10 because the PVP and several bosses are ass and the DLC a -10/Never because fuck that shit lmao.

I agree that they should've gotten it right but to me that's a video production quality thing rather than the reviewer being invalid, which was the claim at the time. They have a budget they should Google how the names are said lol

 

[Ironmage]

Love this post, though some things

I actually disagree that the latter is more anime. It's just more modern
The left is very much based on late 80-90s anime, as well as shoujo manga influence for how mouths are drawn/shaded. I DO prefer it though, especially for models cuz modern anime styles severely flatten the face, even for models. As such we can get more dynamic shading with the older style, but I digress

The other thing, while you are right that IGN interviews are not a monolith, it's the fact that games only have 1 reviewer doing them each a genuine issue, especially if it's someone biased against it. You mentioned how attrocious the MD review was, and it's unfortunately common for how diversified reviewers faded over time. The Sonic Unleashed interview with gameplay is infamous: they go out of their way of following the path to straight up jumping into bottomless pits for Daytime, while Night time despite saying combat is sluggish they ironically play way better for it fluidly

But more importantly, reviewers like him were first off, starting with preestablished bias from common gamer opinion at the time. This also includes genuine xenophobia (see the IGN backed show), which contributed to the JRPG slump in the west, as well as severe insecurity for liking cuter games, as gamers were still running on 90s western marketing for vibes. This unfortunately has an effect for long time franchises, where deviating from the norm heavily will be seen as bad. Sonic is infamous for appeal suddenly growing harsh after he stopped being 1st party, Pokemon similarly suffered a lesser extent of spinoffs doing poorly in relation to mainline after Pokemania died. A lot of old NeoGaf or other gaming site opinions still dictate these fandoms heavily, and I noticed devs trying desperately not to invoke the wrath of those opinions, even though the people that spouted them mostly moved on

Personally, I find game journalism severely mixed cuz of this: on one hand, we have someone actually competent to give fair and detailed analysis. On the other, we have a gamer that refuses to engage with the material cuz of preestablished bias, or just not even liking the genre of gameplay. And unfortunately, the reviews regardless can shape opinion for a game for some

It's no surprise gaming companies seriously took less risks after the 2008 crash, relying way more on nostalgia for older franchises, or in Sony's case, straight abandoning them

While I never really followed the scene closely, I feel like I've run into the opposite groupthink when it comes to novelty in older series and it contributed to me being even more disconnected. For the time shortly after 2008, nostalgia really didn't play a part for me since there just wasn't that much time since I had started gaming. It feels like since the late 2010s every older series has felt pressured to reinvent itself and gets widespread praise for doing so even if the changes make it less enjoyable for me. A decent amount of why I lament a general lack of spinoffs is that if a new idea doesn't mesh with what made the existing stuff good, it still shows up in a mainline entry regardless.

 

[CPU]

View attachment 721188

Intrusive thought incoming

...is Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky better than Imagine Party Babyz?

No ()

I actually did read most of your message and found it fairly insightful jsyk. Did have a question about how you mentioned XBC3 changed the way the series handles sidequests and their level of involvement, but as I haven't played any Xenoblade game it's probably not that reasonable for me to ask it.

 

[ant4456]

Intrusive thought incoming

...is Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky better than Imagine Party Babyz?

No ()

I actually did read most of your message and found it fairly insightful jsyk. Did have a question about how you mentioned XBC3 changed the way the series handles sidequests and their level of involvement, but as I haven't played any Xenoblade game it's probably not that reasonable for me to ask it.

TLDon'tPlay:

xenoblade 1 is like 90% talk to NPC in town, get me 10 of X item

get it come back, standard MMO waste your time shit

xenoblade 3's premium sidequests basically lead to new party members for a special party member slot you unlock like 1/3rd into the game iirc, all with cutscenes voice acting etc.

you also unlock a new Job Class (which is a system exclusive to 3)

those old types of quests are sidelined into the collectapedia where you just have a list of NPCs that want items and then you exchange them

 

[CPU]

TLDon'tPlay:

xenoblade 1 is like 90% talk to NPC in town, get me 10 of X item

get it come back, standard MMO waste your time shit

xenoblade 3's premium sidequests basically lead to new party members for a special party member slot you unlock like 1/3rd into the game iirc, all with cutscenes voice acting etc.

you also unlock a new Job Class (which is a system exclusive to 3)

those old types of quests are sidelined into the collectapedia where you just have a list of NPCs that want items and then you exchange them

Oh, so it's the mindless collecting part that got pared down, not the interacting with NPCs (the role-playing part)

 

[Mova]

TLDon'tPlay:

xenoblade words

do these fetch quests have the desire sensor?

 

[ant4456]

Oh, so it's the mindless collecting part that got pared down, not the interacting with NPCs (the role-playing part)

there are literal hundreds and these are like 90%

 

[pika pal]

I swear from memory a lot of the "20 Bear Asses" type side quests, the ones that are just collecting things without a sub plot, would often just resolve when you grabbed/had the items, to the point of several sidequest rewards coming in the middles of walking through a map or looting a battle withut even going back to an NPC halfway across the game world. While I appreciate the QoL and think it'd be nice for something like if Legends Pokemon games wanted to implement them, it does beg the question why it was done through Sidequests instead of a Collectapedia (akin to LA with the Pokedex tasks).

 

[Volt-Ikazuchi]

This is a terrible take tbh but it's a very common one because few in the gaming space actually seem to understand the role of game journalism and have any media literacy when it comes to things like reviews.

I remember when Xenoblade fans were shitting on IGN because their Xenoblade DE review had a slightly lower score than the original, and the video for the review had someone mispronouncing the names.

So they said the reviewer clearly didn't even play it, or even any game in the series. This is despite the guy who wrote it (named Travis) constantly referred to the original title throughout practically the entire review. And it's pretty known if you look through that he is a big fan of Xenoblade, his specialty is RPGs in the first place.

Then people shit on a discrepancy which is that despite Travis the Xenoblade DE reviewer saying it's the best version of the game, the 3DS version had a better score (8.7) and the original had the best (9/10). This is easily explained by the fact that all of these were written by different people over the course of a decade and with different expectations in mind:

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Now let's do something that nobody in any game review discourse ever does: read the fucking reviews.

Let's evaluates some context for the reviews. The first one is inherently going to have the most gravitas going towards it; Xenoblade Chronicles is a massive, singleplayer MMORPG odyssey essentially, and they somehow fit it onto the Wii. Not only that, but this game actually had other reasons for hype at the time: Xenoblade Chronicles almost never came to America, and its releasing here took a fan effort (

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At the time, Reggie and Nintendo of America was infamous for not believing in their market's ability to accept these types of titles, and skipped out on many titles. Some still didn't make it. This is in spite of these all having English localizations already, having come to English-speaking European countries.

Next up, when we read the blurb under the Review title, we get another tidbit into the minds of the reviewers:

One of the Wii's first and last epic JRPGs is the best thing to emerge from this troubled genre in the past five years.​

This is because, at the time, JRPGs were in a bit of a slump. Final Fantasy was in a dark place, Dragon Quest entered the era where it took a while to get new entries, Monster Hunter wasn't nearly as big outside of Japan. Pokemon wasn't largely seen as a "JRPG" to a lot of people, Persona hadn't popped off with Persona 5 yet (though it was definitely a known quantity, and this was the year of Persona 4: Golden.)

All that to say, JRPGs had, in fact, been in a it of a slump, and the reviewer clearly is going into it with it being an exception to a general rule. This will, of course, naturally impact their perception of the title's quality. So we're essentially combining several Wow-Factors on top here, just from a bit of videogame history knowledge and reading three lines of the article.
-Getting a game like this on the Wii was insane.
-JRPGs were in a bit of a slump.

Now, let's continue onto the "thesis" of this review.

View attachment 721150

The writer is establishing the tone here quite clearly, Xenoblade Chronicles is, to their view, a special game within the genre. What I care more about, however, is the retrospective perspective- some of the things written here as points in Xenoblade's uniqueness is actually really common now, and if anything that's already becoming "counter-cultured" within the genre.

Xenoblade Chronicles is, again, kind of a singleplayer MMO RPG, and that is mentioned here with the side quests. You can go around the world and grab quests from NPCs, go and fight monsters off the beaten path and find goodies, and increase reputation, get new armor, etc. MMO shit. This was not as common back then, and it's also something that many modern RPGs are back-lashing towards, and a few years ago people kind of started getting sick of.

Nowadays most things like this would be considered "padding", and in my opinion, for good reason. An excuse to force you to do a lot more shit to get little, all for that 100%. In fact, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, two years after DE, changed the systems a lot. These sort of fetch quests and reputation with settlements still exists, but it's all passive and you can do it by just going to a menu from anywhere in the world and clicking A like three times to finish the quest.

View attachment 721152

Most of the other quests are instead mini-questlines with optional characters that add depth to the world, and are often (almost) main quest level events. So they've eased back on this sort of thing over time, and for good reason, this kind of thing blows. Persona 5 blowing up was a big push for RPGs to, rather than throw in this kind of padding, try to use side characters as a way to associate side content that fleshes out the world positively. Every Xenoblade game had Heart-to-Hearts where characters in the party talk to each other optionally, usually without a quest, and Xenoblade 3 got rid of it for that kind of approach.

Moving on,


View attachment 721153

Also worth noting that the culture around this type of game element, random shit all over the world, is kind of hitting its own counter-culture. You don't have to go far to hear "I'm sick of exploring an empty plane to pick up fifteen Scrimblos so I can make one thing I care about." In the years between the original and the remake, sprawling worlds full of materials are everywhere, and people are kind of sick of it. This is the kind of thing that makes games age no matter how new they are, or even irrespective of the graphics. Evolution of game design.

Skipping ahead some irrelevant stuff for this essay,

View attachment 721154

For anyone who hasn't seen it, it really isn't that stylish compared to most things today. And if I were to review Xenoblade DE, something like how that barely looks better in the newer version is in fact something that'd stick in my mind for a $60 Remake.

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More mention of disappointment with RPGs before this game in the last 5 years.

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And active disappointment with RPGs of the time, and how Xenoblade isn't like that. Even going as far as to say "this struggling genre". The linearity of Final Fantasy XIII made it a clear punching bag for a lot of the industry (and a lot of the players) back then, so it's not too surprising to see it mentioned negatively. There is however a growing number of people who like the game.

View attachment 721160

And that ends this -'ridin sesh from this author. Now let's talk about the 3-ish years between this game and the 3DS port. So far, we had zero real sequels between Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 3D as Xenoblade Chronicles X, the only pre-Switch one, was still not out yet. Notably, the 3DS game had its own wow-factor, being that now it's running on a fucking 3DS.

Notably, Monolith Soft actually weren't the main developers on this port, and that port team is Monster Games. Anywho, Xenoblade 3D was a very low-scale project that really was just porting it to the New 3DS, with few extras, mainly a way to listen to the music any time you'd like.

This is a very short review, but the reviewer (Jose, different person) gives it a lower score than the original for a very clear reason.

View attachment 721161

The port is still given its flowers for still basically being the full package,

View attachment 721162

but this is a port of a 3 year old game for full-price on a system that, to be clear, you had to buy the New version to even play it. 8.7/10 seems fine to me, a lower score for a good port that could've been polished more, but overall about the same thing.

Then we get to the review that really, truly grinded people's gears:

View attachment 721163

By Travis, the review starts with a recap on how the game has never truly had a good shot with its ports before, coming on low-spec consoles. After that, we get a paragraph about actually one of the more hit/miss changes with the remake, and one that the reviewer is mostly positive on.

View attachment 721164

Now I want to give a little spiel about this, I don't agree with this reviewer, I am one of the people where the game's new artstyle is absolutely a "miss". Now, to be clear, Xenoblade Chronicles DE absolutely is better on a technical level in every way, and many blurry points before now look perfectly fine. But what I actually prefer in the original is the less generically "anime" artstyle:

View attachment 721166

It's best shown with these portraits which are used in the battle UI in my opinion, because here we can remove the "bias" I guess you could say with low-poly Shulk versus high-poly Shulk. In my opinion, this loses a lot of the charm especially for a war-torn world that wasn't really built from the ground-up for this artstyle.

Next I want to point out that the beginning of the third fucking paragraph instantly mentions that the reviewer played the game around a decade ago.

View attachment 721167

You could maybe argue this is ambiguous, but "right back" to me is pretty clear, and we get like fifteen statements like this. Anywho, in the next paragraph we instantly find one of those clashes from eight years apart + different reviewers!

View attachment 721168

While both this and the original review are positive on the story, they have completely different takes on what the story actually is. The original review praised Xenoblade for having "none of the pompousness and melodrama of less accomplished Japanese epics," and some other comments on the writing that I didn't nitpick earlier.

View attachment 721170

I'd say that this and "dialogue laughably over-written" are, while not complete contradictions, different views on something over many years. And within the Xenoblade community to begin with, lots of dialogue from the games is entirely memed for its self-seriousness, lines being repeated, etc.

View attachment 721171

The DE remake reviewer does praise the character writing, and that's not a contradiction. The characters don't need to be believable to be fun to read, but I'd kind of agree with Travis who makes consistent mention that the game's writing gets wonky, it does take itself too seriously (and that's charming), it is melodramatic and more.

View attachment 721173

The DE reviewer finds great annoyance with the constant talking though, while the original reviewer

View attachment 721174

sees it as defying their expectations of what they view RPG characters as being like at the time. The DE reviewer goes on to talk about gameplay improvements, and lack of improvements, mentioning a few QoL bits for the UI such as actual health bars and indicators for the player to know their positioning will get them bonuses. But then they go onto say that there isn't much changed:

View attachment 721175

This is really getting at the meat-and-potatoes on how a game that the reviewer says is "the best version" could get a lower review than the previous two- "Wii-era RPG design". Game reviewers tend to have different opinions on this kind of thing. Should remasters be judged as if they came out today, should it be about improvements to the original, or some other nebulous things?

Personally, I am of the opinion that if a remaster costs $60 it should come at the quality of a $60 game, and I get the vibe that's how this reviewer kind of feels as well. Beyond that, we see that in the last eight years of design change, fucking around in the kinda-boring-overworld and fighting/collecting things over and over has become a tedious negative.

The reviewer does praise the change to menuing, which is good, but this is still a compliment sandwich where clearly the fillings grinded the writer's gears the most. They do this again, writing a paragraph about how combat is still great with switching between characters,

View attachment 721177

we get this. Then we get a full paragraph about how the OST is incredible, of course.

View attachment 721180

So the reviewer gives it an 8/10, and its verdict makes it pretty clear. Despite how the game is finally on hardware where the game can truly be free, it's been eight years and shit has changed. Now, where does this all lead? Should be clear that the controversy over this review is pretty silly and that if you think about the reviews all of it makes sense.

They reviewed it as a $60 product in 2020 rather than an incremental rerelease from 2012 that just needed to be it again. And I think that's fine if not good. But you wanna know why I spend all this time defending reviews? Because this is the type of review that is actually good. The perspective of a critical veteran to the series is something that is highly vital to a review in my opinion, and this kind of thing really is a time capsule into both worlds of what happened between releases.

This is a good review that was recorded into a video by someone who hadn't played it. Who cares. Well, people don't think about it this way because we are so used to Youtube Essayist shitters who do everything and have a "persona". People see journalist organizations as just an organization rather than a group of people, which is part of the problem with media literacy on these topics in general.

People have also become used to fishing for "hypocrisy" which you can use to make any review from a company that has existed as long as IGN look silly. This company has had hundreds of people make reviews for them in the past with the control to write review scores, and people act like it should still be a leaderboard or some shit. "If a 7.5/10 today is a game better than a 8/10 from some random writer making a review for a game in 2014 with different expectations, IGN is entirely ridiculous".

I mean, almost every example of IGN reviews being dumb are just not accepting opinions, expecting complete "consistency" (whatever that's supposed to be, reviews should be personal as they are), or just making up a narrative. I mean I get it too, being a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fan. Look at this:

View attachment 721184

From paragraph one we already can tell this reviewer really doesn't give a shit about the game.

View attachment 721185

Like, this guy really hates this game series and thinks it's really not fun, it's pointless, hates the plot (which most people like), etc.

View attachment 721187

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And like, alright. This review kinda sucks, right? Like, it's so dripping with bias that it's hard to take everything at face value. Which is a fucking good thing. A review is a personal account, not a fucking Wikipedia page.

If I wanted a neutral, dryly-written tale on each element of the game I'd have so many fucking ways outside of a review. This is what reviews are for, bluntly, in the most crude way! I absolutely detest this reviewer's opinion, and don't even think this is a "good review", but it's not a bad one. It's an honest one.

If you care about graphics like it not looking like a GBA game? He's got you covered, telling you it looks like that and he dislikes it. Bought the last game and was hoping for massive improvements? He doesn't see many, and he covers that. And frankly, you can make a good argument that the gameplay is "dated". Go to any r/mysterydungeon random user and you'll find that like 50% of PMD fans think the gameplay is fucking mid anyways. The only thing I'll say is there is one bit of actual misinformation which is that Vulpix is also a playable character now, but also whatever sure. The tone this guy has would piss me off I was like 14, but I understand that if you are like 30 and your company tells you to go from probably playing some AAA titles to this you'd probably also be like this:

View attachment 721190

Which is also, unironically, laughably really fucking funny and so true. I mean people talk up the "difficulty" of these games, but I ran this game with partner Eevee (shocking??!?!?!) and a mid ass starter several times and yeah this game definitely plays the same. And a critique on needing to read a FAQ to get your starter is really fucking funny to me right now, and has always been true - and later games changed this for good reason. Bro also knows about the fury culture with the Phanpy line too LOL.

He also gives some credit which I think is fair:

View attachment 721191

Yeah I agree that Special Episodes feel a bit weird, some of the early ones kinda suck, and that the later ones are better. I also agree that frankly the better ones would be better tied into the main story more. This is real critique that I actually rarely see from PMD fans despite this being part of why I rarely touch the Special Episodes myself.

So, Mr. Jack from IGN in 2008, fuck you. But also like, the review isn't bad. It's just not something I agree with. And that's the mindset I think people should have more with reviews.

People shit on IGN if they step out of line, or if they keep in line, it honestly doesn't matter. Give every AAA game an 8/10 because they're genuinely mostly fine? IGN sucks. Give Pokemon a 7.8/10 and mention a genuine flaw with the region for a full-price title? Also fuck you, get memed for a decade.

It's not just IGN, of course. I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 was dropping and GameSpot reviewer got the PS4 copy, and gave a pretty negative review.

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So here we have a 7/10 given to Cyberpunk 2077, a game that these people hadn't played yet because it wasn't out, and all the replies are fucking wilding out about how this is hypocritical for Skyrim, this reviewer is clearly just woke, "That's the person who did the 7.8/10!", "She's just an offended woman!", etc.

And of course, we all know how this turned out. Someone tried to tread the middleground of not being completely harsh without a day one patch and also reviewing what they were given, and they got harassed to no end by people who hadn't played the game yet.

This is gaming journalism almost working but the people lash out so hard that it fails. Game journalism is important but chuds and frankly just gamers in general actually hate journalism. It tells them games they haven't played aren't as good as they like, or games they don't like are better than they thought, and it's people rather than an AI generated review score on a mental leaderboard of titles.

I don't think I know a single person who hates gaming journalism who actually lacks brainrot about it because there isn't really a reason to hate it as a whole. This whole post has been mainly focused on reviews, since that gets the most talked about, but then you have people like Jason Schreier who is publishing books on Blizzard projects that we will never see the day of, how gaming journalists talk to whistleblowers on crunch, layoffs, and more.

View attachment 721198

Rock Paper Shotgun, for instance, is an outlet mainly focused on the industry at large and has an entire page dedicated to all the stories of layoffs, which is really important and a way we get people like Geoff Keighley to finally acknowledge the situation. But notably, this also means that people had to write all of these, too.

Gaming journalism is important because the industry is important and having a variety of opinions is important, especially from people who are actually going to play thousands of games. A lot of reviews I see that fans of one series dislike will read like "This game is fine but it's not too special" because they've played many games like it at the same or greater scale, and that's why when games like Astro Bot, Balatro, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 sweep awards and get mass critical acclaim it's very clear from the get-go. When even the people who've played the biggest games back-to-back-to-back are able to articulate how a game like Breath of the Wild is truly different, that's how we get games like Ocarina of Time standing the test of time on Metacritic.

If you're in 2 minds over whether you want to try out a game or not, you watch someone play it on YouTube or Twitch for an hour and then decide whether it seems like your vibe.

And this is why I couldn't possibly care less about reviews.

Ultimately, I'm the one who is going to play the game, instead of rolling the dice and hoping I get a review that isn't glazing some nonsense, I'm going to check Youtube for some no commentary gameplay footage or try to get a demo.

It did remind me of this video tho.

Ant, no disrespect, but sometimes we can kinda get too focused on the broader side of games like historical value, and even look at it as an artform.

They're primarily entertainment though. If I boot up a game and I find it boring, I'm going to say something ranging from "Yeah, that ain't for me" to "This is fucking trash, are you kidding me?"

To give an example in Pokémon, so that everyone here is on the same page.

People love to sing HGSS's praises. It does have the best presentation of all the handheld games, if not all the mainline games.

That game is also a steaming pile of shit.

Running around with a bunch of trash Johto mons without the elemental punches to spice up their coverage, horrible game design decisions all over the place, and all the stupid grinding in the slowest engine of the franchise is a tortuous experience gameplay-wise. As a remake, it doesn't fix 10% of the originals' issues.

I'm sure most of you will disagree with what I just said about HGSS, and that's fine because your opinion matters. Y'all can play the game and form your own opinions. That's what's important. Have your own experiences.